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#DOES14 Conference Notes

DevOps is a thing in the Enterprise and DevOps Enterprise Summit #DOES14 certainly made the case showing organizations such as Disney, GE, Target and groups within the US Government working on DevOps styled initiatives.

I got home super late and i’m super drained from too much allergy/sinus meds but I wanted to share some thoughts here and express my enthusiasm and gratitude for such a fantastic event. Expect more soon, but a quick summary follows:

Common aspects of DevOps in the enterprise:

Agile – Lots of Agile transformations and Agile team development. Seemed to be one of the most consistent messages that enterprises feel the need to adopt Agile methodologies to achieve DevOps goals.

Tools – Enterprises aren’t just doing unit tests and artifact management through CI / CD systems but they’re using them to solve challenges such as code reviews, security, audit, compliance, risk analysis, security analysis and much more. I was excited to see so much discussion on this topic not just from a developer /operations perspective but how management and auditors see opportunity to drive value here as well.

Case Studies – If you needed/wanted case studies, you simply should have been here. Be sure to watch the #DOES14 website and youtube for release of speaker decks and Videos.

Some common concerns that stuck out were definitely:

User Acceptance Testing – This issue was almost universal regardless if your app is in house or a commercial off the shelf system (COTS) – now that you can empower your development and operations team to automate much of the grunt work of CI / CD and development testing the “UAT” part of QA is still very manual & hands on setting the takt time for your entire organization.

Audits – Lots of concerns/questions on Audit. There may need to be an entire day track to cover the issues of Enterprise Audits. Maybe next year? We didn’t even scratch the surface on this topic and yet, it was an open question with so many speakers and attendees curious as to what others do here.

Personal Thoughts:

To be honest, I was impressed with the depth and breadth that some of these organizations have adopted Lean / Agile and DevOps values. If Gene Kim accomplished anything with this conference it was making a bold statement that DevOps is in the Enterprise and backing that up with three days of solid evidence for that.

One thing I hope to see next year is how more organizations derive the value and do value stream mapping. I love the enthusiasm and love seeing what people have done but sometimes I felt people were too enthusiastic about trying to do “DevOps” to be like others that do “DevOps” and spend so much to measure how they compare against others in that regard. I’m not sure that this competitive notion of who can DevOp better than everyone else is wrong per se, but I do feel sometimes people do things to lead an idea more than they do things to solve problems. A local optimization gone mad if you will 😉 (In a way I have a fear of Applied DevOps.. hehe)

I’m still recovering and getting all of my notes together. If you have any specific questions/comments or if you were at the conference and want to discuss particular topics, get in touch! More posts to come, especially when I can link in videos / slides to share as they get released/published!

Edit: Update at 3:18 PM – We discussed the conference a bit on HangOps this afternoon. Feel free to watch the discussion on YouTube below!